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Originally Posted by jb2000
With these kind of symbols, it is hard to tell somebody to ignore the bast body of what they stood for and allow them to be displayed as some kind of memorial. The simple fact is that a lot of people do not want those types of things memorialized. They don't want to honor what they consider a criminal and treasonous confederacy which rose up in arms against their nation, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American citizens. They don't want to honor the fact that this was done primarily over whether or not states should have the right to maintain slavery or whether the federal government had the authority to interfere in states affairs on that matter, even if it was a matter or precident and/or principle.
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I guess this is where we disagree. You refer to the Confederacy as rising up in arms against their nation. Their nation was the Confederacy since they seceded from the Union. They wanted self rule something that up until that time was considered their right as long as their state legislatures voted to. It was the North who took up arms to prevent them.
It required the state legislatures to vote them into the Union and it was understood that those same legislatures could vote them out of it. If the North would not have taken up arms to prevent it there wouldn't have been the death of thousands. In my opinion and many others the North was wrong to do so. All they had to do is let them go.
I'll admit the South wanted to rule themselves including the right to have slaves but that was not what the war was about. We have already discussed what the leaders of the Union thought about slavery including the right to own them in the North even after the Emancipation Proclimation banned it in the South. Do you really think the Union cared one way or another except for political leverage? Don't you think Lincoln would have asked/made Grant free his slaves instead of keeping them till long after the war ended?
So that is why we don't see what is wrong with honoring these brave young men and boys for fighting for their homeland. They were not treasonous and criminal. Many people then and now think they were in the right, just outnumbered and ill equipped.
If intelligent folks like yourself do not see the honor in what these soldiers did and why we might want to remember them, then I am going to resist posting much more on the matter. Like ShaniFaye I've said about all I can.